PrestaShop 1.7 starts the Symfony journey for the Community

The team working on the PrestaShop eCommerce platform launched 1.7 on November 7th 2016. This is the first publicly available version which is includes the Symfony Framework by default.

This release is important step of moving towards standardising on an existing web framework. The move to Symfony was announced back in December 2015:

We made our choice: PrestaShop 1.7 will introduce Symfony2 in its Core codebase. This major release will also be a great turn on the technical side of the application, but this change will be negotiated smoothly and over the long term: not everything will change with 1.7.
- An Update On The [PrestaShop] 1.7 Architecture

The team has continued on their set path and less than a year later Symfony now ships with PrestaShop 1.7. This first release is still very much a hybrid between the old and the new.

As a Symfony framework developer, don't expect to step into the la-la-land just yet. As any responsible software project with a large user base, backwards compatibility is a key concern. Striking a balance between new features and gradual architectural improvements is important.

As many established PHP projects need to revamp their core architecture to maintain relevancy, Symfony has shown to be one great option both in the form of components as well as a complete web framework like in the case of Akeneo, eZ Platform and OroCRM.